Nate Silver : 50 Percent is Not a Magic Number

50 Percent is Not a Magic Number
by Nate Silver @ 7:46 AM


This past Friday, I woke up at the crack of dawn to do an interview for Fox and Friends. As I walked into the studio on the ground floor of the News Corporation building, a producer, the urgency apparent on her face, handed me a printout of an article indicating that Barack Obama's approval rating had dropped to 50 percent in the latest Gallup poll, which is where it remains as of this morning.

This is modestly unorthodox, for what it's worth. I've done a few dozen television interviews now and have never before been handed a piece of paper with what I guess are supposed to be that day's discussion points. But this is a morning show and Obama's approval numbers were not a topic that I'd discussed the previous night with the producers; they wanted to make sure I was prepared. No harm there, I suppose.

The thing is, though, that Obama's approval rating haven fallen to 50 percent is not particularly newsworthy. There's no reason that a drop from 51 percent to 50 percent, or from 50 percent to 49 percent, means anything particularly more than a drop from 58 percent to 57 percent, or from 37 percent to 36 percent.

First of all, although I'm on record as being quite pessimistic about what's liable to happen to the Democrats in 2010, odds are that Obama's approval will have to be somewhat worse than 50 percent for the Democrats to lose the House. The relationship between Presidential approval and his party's fate at the midterm elections is quite linear. An approval rating of 50 percent would typically be associated with a loss of about 26 seats:



The Democrats, however, currently have a 78-seat advantage in the House, meaning that it would take a 39-seat loss for them to lose control of the chamber. The over-under for how unpopular Obama would have to be in order to be more likely than not to cost his party those seats is not 50 percent -- it's probably more like 42 percent. Now, certainly, there's some margin for uncertainty there: Dwight Eisenhower's Republicans, in '58, lost nearly 50 seats even though his approval was in the high 50's. But the point is, there's nothing particularly magical about Obama being above or below 50.

more...

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/08/50-percent-is-not-magic-number.html

..... quit making SENSE!!!

(Not to mention the fact that we have a LONG way to go until next summer.)

:hi: